Velveteen Impact — Peticolas Brewery in Dallas, Texas
I’ll never forget the first time I had a Velvet Hammer.
The Anvil in Dallas, now sadly closed, was a Texas approximation of an “English-style” pub, which in practice meant dark wood interiors and an absence of the American kitsch that usually adorns the walls of dive bars on this side of the ocean. Before moving to the US in my mid-twenties, I thought beer was fine—a lubricant for hanging out and getting drunk, rather than a thing of pure beauty. But the US beer scene and the beer selection in even the lowest-rent venues meant that, eventually, I collided with beers from the likes of Sierra Nevada, Anchor, and New Belgium.
There wasn’t a huge variety of local beer in Dallas in 2011, but The Anvil had Peticolas Brewing Company’s Velvet Hammer on tap, and for some reason that day it was $3—and I was broke and thirsty.
Photography by Kathy Tran
Velvet Hammer was the first local beer that opened me up to beer, and the first beer Peticolas ever released. It is very accurately named: slightly hoppy, falling on the resinous end of the spectrum, and with a sweet burst of malt, but mainly it’s refreshing and extremely easy-drinking, especially on a sunny patio in Texas and served ice-cold. Which is a problem, because it’s a 9% imperial red ale. This was also my first introduction into the idea that a pint, drunk at regular pint speed, could assassinate you.
“A Velvet Hammer honestly changes all your wiring for all other beers,” says Nick Rallo, food writer for Dallas’ D Magazine. “It’s a dangerous beer, because it’s so good and complex that it gets into your nervous system and makes you think, ‘I need to buy a boat so I can drink this beer on it’.”
This is the sort of much-revered cult beer we’re talking about here, with a sensory and cultural impact that befits its name.
Michael Peticolas, the founder of Peticolas, is an easy person to imagine yourself chatting with over one of these evening-ending pints. He opens our chat, on a frosty morning at his brewery in Dallas’ Design District, by telling me how he got into beer.
“I went home to El Paso, which is where I'm from originally, and I'm sitting on my mom's patio overlooking the mountains of Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico, and she brings out these two big old bombers of beer,” he says.
“I didn't even really know what it was at the time, [but] it was like ‘Okay, wow. This is fantastic. This is like beer that's better than what you can buy at the store down the street.’ And we're enjoying this in this wonderful view, between me and my mom.”
Michael is visibly mentally back in El Paso as he says this, sitting on his mother Jaque’s porch, drinking her homebrew.
“And that was my first realisation of the experience being what it's all about when it comes to beer. It's not just the taste. It's the experience, everything that's going on. Good settings, good friends, family. That's why a terrible beer in Manaus tastes fantastic. ‘Cause you're there for the World Cup.”
His is not a throwaway comment. Michael says he left his law career to pursue one of his “two passions—beer and soccer”, and his brewery has successfully combined the two. Not only is the Peticolas logo styled like the badge on a football shirt (or “soccer jersey”, as they would say in the US), but the brewery has become a rallying point for soccer fans in a city dominated by the NFL and the Dallas Cowboys.
The brewery has a party for every US national soccer game. Michael and his wife travel to every World Cup. The brewery puts out a new themed beer for every World Cup—their 7.5% IPA Thrilla in Brazilla for the 2014 tournament was a particular highlight.
For many breweries, releasing one new beer every four years would not be remarkable, but Peticolas has all but brewed the same few beers since being founded; classic styles to boot. The brewery’s mainstays include an Irish ale, a dry stout, an English pale ale, a Scottish ale, a Tripel, and a handful of IPAs.
Peticolas was one of my first encounters with truly excellent beer, and so I thought that quality would be the norm. I would instead spend a long time looking for something in Texas quite as good as Peticolas.
Now, with years of experience, I know that Peticolas was producing fundamentally excellent versions of these classic styles, with no adjuncts, gimmicks, or spins on a classic—just straight-up, old school European recipes, brewed with incredible technique and consistency. Michael tells me that his love for these classic European styles is fundamental to the brewery.
“I'm very slow moving and somewhat old fashioned with my perception of beer, and probably as a result, the brewery's presentation of beer,” he says. “My old way of thinking is [restaurants and bars] wanna stick with what they know. They're tired of changing their tap every two weeks.”
Bars and restaurants across Dallas almost invariably have at least one permanent Peticolas line. This is usually Golden Opportunity, a 4.6% Kolsch that is as crisp, fresh, and light as can be. You’ll often find it around Dallas served—somewhat divisively, but appropriate for the Texas heat—in a frosted glass, with enough Kolsch yeast character to define it against the sub-5% lager industry taps.
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Peticolas tends to dominate local taps not only because of beer quality, but for another, frankly crazy, reason: until 2011, when they opened, there were no other breweries in Dallas.
“Michael Peticolas literally took on City Hall to change the laws that prevented craft brewers from setting up shop in Dallas,” say Chris Wolfgang, food critic at the Dallas Observer. “Every craft brewer in Dallas, and there are some truly talented ones here, owe Peticolas a debt of gratitude for making their dreams possible.”
Michael didn’t merely found the city’s beer scene—he rewrote the law book to do it.
““That was my first realisation of the experience being what it’s all about when it comes to beer. It’s not just the taste. It’s the experience, everything that’s going on. Good settings, good friends, family.””
The background to this is buried in zoning and legality, but in short, Michael thought he’d spotted a golden opportunity in opening the first brewery in Dallas 15-odd years ago, only to discover why there were none—it was illegal to brew beer in the city limits thanks to some Prohibition-era local laws still in effect. This had seemingly defeated every brewer so far, but Michael, fortuitously, was a lawyer.
“No one had come to Dallas [City Hall] in I don't know how many years saying, ‘Hey, I wanna open a brewery’, Michael explains. “And so I had to educate them about what it was that we were doing, what we were manufacturing. Took a bit of time 'cause they didn't fully grasp it. In fact, they had initially said ‘Yeah, you need to do it in this zone’. Every area around town is zoned different, in a different manner.”
“So I found a place in a light industrial zone. And then just before I signed a lease,” he continues, “I found a provision in the Dallas Property Code that made it clear to me I couldn't manufacture alcohol in that kind of zone.”
City Hall were unaware of any of these laws. Eventually, Michael’s work resulted in the statute book being updated—just for him—and a deluge of breweries sprung up in Dallas in his wake. Peticolas remains the brewery that made any of that possible.
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Even though it’s the oldest and most established brewery in Dallas, Peticolas continues to grow every year. That’s not just because Michael is a brewer whose talents can knock out complex beers such as tripels—like the 9% A Lost Epic, so full of depth, sweetness, character, and flavour it rivals stalwart Belgian tripels Karmeliet and Golden Carolus—but because they are fiercely protective of their product.
““Every craft brewer in Dallas, and there are some truly talented ones here, owe Peticolas a debt of gratitude for making their dreams possible.””
Peticolas’ distribution model is very unusual for American breweries. Permission to sell directly to retailers varies from state to state; in Texas, breweries with self-distribution licenses can sell and distribute beer to bars, restaurants, and other accounts. At Peticolas, the brewery’s employees distribute all the beer sold in Dallas. Michael explains that this very careful growth tactic has kept them safe from the sort of distributional overreach that can doom small breweries.
“Nothing just goes straight. It comes back down,” he says. “It's a matter of when it's gonna come back down. I operated this place in a manner to handle the downs, and when I talk about slow and steady winning the race, that's the approach we took. All we sold were kegs for the first 10 years.”
Indeed, during my five years in Dallas, you could only get Peticolas on draught and nothing else. The company has recently begun canning beer, and so for the first time, you can now get Peticolas in Dallas supermarkets—although such was the demand for Peticolas in the 2011-2015 period I was in Dallas, you could pick up your own kegs of Velvet Hammer from some Dallas supermarkets for your home kegerators.
This commitment to the slow and steady, retaining ownership over the distribution of its product, and concentrating on just their home city has meant that the Peticolas brand has become truly a central part of food and drink around Dallas, yet it has essentially no visibility anywhere else. It’s a unique little bubble, enhanced by the fact that Dallas is over 200 miles away from the nearest other major Texan market, in Austin.
“There were two breweries in the wider area when I was dealing with the city,” says Michael—those two being Rahr in Fort Worth and Franconia in McKinney, both a long way from Dallas. “Now there's probably 85 or 90 in North Texas. So you go in there now into Dallas and they've dealt with it.”
The city now presents new breweries with the system of regulations they’re required to follow, drawn up from Michael’s legal work. That’s the impact he and Peticolas had—it literally created the Dallas beer scene. Rather than start the scene and then get overtaken by others though, Michael’s brewing skill means Peticolas is still the jewel of the pubs and bars of Dallas.
“Texas has always had great beer, but Dallas never had anything like the craft beer that Peticolas brings to the table,” Nick tells me. “Dallas needed a beer that matches the energy of the food scene. Peticolas brought that energy.”
Should you one day end up here, you can look forward to going into pretty much any bar or restaurant and getting an extremely cold pint of Velvet Hammer, and understanding the legend.
“There’s some kind of magic going on with it,” says Chris. “As a rule I don’t like a lot of hoppy beers, but Velvet Hammer manages to balance the hops with these sweet caramel and floral notes into a beer that’s smoother than it has any right to be.”
After a thirst-slaking sip you’ll realise that Peticolas specialise in brewing beers that reflect classic styles and don’t overcomplicate recipes, but absolutely nail whatever it is you’d want to be drinking right now. You’ll see that this unique little brewery has become the beating beery heart of the city, and you’ll see that none of the beer in the ninth-largest city in the US would have been possible without Michael getting drunk with his mother on her patio while watching the sun set over Texas’ Franklin Mountains.
When the time came to move back to the UK, I was finally aware of good beer. With a world of European brewing on my doorstep, I travelled around Europe and subsequently started learning to brew. The first beer I tried cloning? A Peticolas Velvet Hammer.
